#1164 - OIC - Are you on Projects?

Introduction 

This is a question I've asked customers many times in the past; usually when they have inquired about new functionality we are offering. Net, net - if you're not on projects, you're missing out on so much. Most new features are only available within projects, and using projects will make your OIC life a lot easier; not just from a design-time, but also from a runtime perspective.

But let's begin by looking at some of the drivers for projects.

Drivers for Projects

There are many drivers, let's begin with the basic one of access control.

Fine Grained Access Control

If you develop your integrations in the "global space", i.e. outside of projects, then all OIC developers can use/abuse your work. Some may feel there's something democratic about this, but it really isn't what customers require. 

Again, any integrations I create can be edited by others -

Project RBAC mitigates this issue, also allowing multiple teams of developers to use the same OIC instance. Just think of that - no more separate OIC instances for your ERP and HCM integration developers. 

Check out my detailed post, here, on project RBAC. Also, more about this later, in our projects deep dive. Also note, projects are not just design time folders, they also give us a context for runtime observability.

Now to the next issue - sometimes integrations are just not enough... 

Business Automation is more than just Integration

Back in the global space, I can create my integrations and organize them into packages. That's essentially my integration toolkit.

But often, integrations are not enough, that's the reason we added many more useful components/technologies to projects - 

Let's go through the icons on the left, these give us access to all of the project based components - 

Now that's what I call a toolkit!

AI driven support

AI pops up everywhere today. The maxim seems to be - if it doesn't have AI, leave it! At OIC, we've adopted a very sober and effective approach - leveraging AI to make our design- and runtime more intelligent. This accelerates development and powers runtime monitoring of your integrations etc. 

How this is implemented in the context of projects, will be discussed in one of the following sections.

The OIC Projects Toolkit

Let's go through these 1 by 1. This section is meant as an introduction to the different process automation components, however, I do include links to more detailed posts. a caveat to begin with - most of the top level descriptions are taken from the Oracle Docs. 

Project Based Integrations

In the integrations tab, you can create your integrations, connections, lookups, OIC events. You can also upload javascript to your libraries. Now you do have all of that in the "global space", however, we also have the following project value-adds -

• Ability to monitor runtime within the context of a project
• Ability to deploy all the components you have used, not just integrations.
• Lots of design time support, some of this being AI driven.

AI Agents   

I have posted many times on AI Agents, you can check out those posts here. This particular post is a good introduction. Net, net, you can create and run your AI Agents in OIC. However, even more compelling - you can publish existing project integrations as agent tool, with one click - 

This is a huge value-add, allowing you to give your AI agents immediate, controlled and compliant access to enterprise systems of record. Those agents could be running anywhere, not just on OIC. 

The secret sauce is the ability to expose your project integrations/tools via MCP - 

Robots

OIC's RPA component enables you to use software "robots" to mimic human interactions—such as clicking, typing, and navigating—on web and desktop user interfaces, automating repetitive manual tasks in legacy or non-API systems directly. These robots can be easily invoked from integrations, using a native action.

Human in the Loop

This component provides rich human approvals functionality, directly within OIC. This is especially useful in the context of AI Agents, where, sometimes, human intervention is required. Think of an agent processing orders and then hitting an extremely large order from a new customer. Let's assign an approval task to our sales manager instead of letting the LLM cope with this.

Human in the loop includes Workflows and UI Forms - 

If interested, then please check out my post on HITL. It is from April 2026 and some extra functionality has been added since then; but it will give you the basics.

Decisions  

Decisions let's you declaratively create business rules and decision logic. Within OIC, these decisions leverage standards such as DMN ( Decision Model and Notation). Examples of such could be - 

• calculating order discounts
• applying export compliance policies 
• approval routings etc.

Interested? Then please check out the detailed post here.

Healthcare

Oracle Integration for Healthcare enables you to create integrations that interact with healthcare organizations that use HL7 and FHIR.

This is probably not relevant for most OIC customers, but it's an awesome value-add, for those integrating with health care systems.

B2B

Oracle Integration provides support for B2B e-commerce with B2B for Oracle Integration.

B2B for Oracle Integration represents a collective set of features inside Oracle Integration to support processing, including:

• A trading partner management interface.
• An EDI schema editor for customization.
• A specialized B2B tracking user interface for viewing messages exchanged with trading partners.
• Adapters to support B2B protocols such as AS2 and FTP. 
• Actions you place within your integrations for EDI processing. 

Knowledge Base

 OIC Knowledge Base is a built-in RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) feature that acts as long-term memory for AI agents. It ingests corporate documents (like PDFs, contracts, and policies) into a vector-indexed store backed by OCI Search with OpenSearch, allowing AI agents to retrieve precise, grounded, and cited facts during runtime.

That, in a nutshell, is the OIC Process Automation Toolkit. 

Now let's look at the Project Framework itself.

OIC Project Framework

The OIC Home page now offers the following options for creating a project - 

Net, net - create your own, choose from an large set of existing projects.

Guide me

Essentially, tell me what you want and I'll see what we have OOTB. Otherwise, go ahead and build what you need.

I'll build my own project

You know what you want? Then go for it!

Note the options to import and download from a repository; there is no repository support for those developing in the "global space". 

Browse solutions

Check out the existing projects in the Integration Store - 

You can filter this list by type and keywords - 

Project RBAC

You can immediately define global visibility, when creating a new project, or you can set this afterwards -

Back to the 2 sets of developers I mentioned earlier - our HCM and ERP integration folks. I can create groups for these folks in OCI IAM and assign OIC users to those groups. These groups can then be used to grant access at the required level to a project.

Artifact Sharing

If I don't share the project, then none of it's artifacts are visible outside of the project.

 
However, I may have "common" projects that include common resources such an connection and integrations. This is another great value-add of projects - the ability to share artifacts at a fine grained level.

The ability to share is a huge value-add; instead of having a plethora of connection to Fusion ERP Cloud, you can just have one. The same applies to integrations - we have one common logging integration and that's it!

Project Tabs

Design, Deploy and Observe.

Design is where I do my development. Clicking on the component icons on the left will bring me to the design UI for that component.

Deploy is where I create and package my project deployments - 

Here I can include the other process automation components and not just integrations; again, something that's not available in the "global space".

You can decide which integrations to deploy, also which versions of such. As already mentioned, you can also bundle other components.

Deployments can be exported as follows - 

A CAR file is very similar to the .iar file we already know and love. Note also the ability to export to a repository.

We provide Terraform support as well - 

Net, net - with projects we make it very easy for you to deploy your process automations from one environment to another e.g. from Dev to Test to Production.

Observe allows us to monitor the project from a runtime perspective.

Note, all the other runtime components can be monitored from here. 

You can design your projects as fine grained or coarse grained as you like. You decide. However, creating projects for discrete functional areas will be more beneficial than creating one humungous project and dumping everything in there.

Finally the OIC Factory api has been augmented with a rich set of project apis, which make automation very easy.

Use of AI in OIC Projects

Designtime

Generate Integrations based on natural language input - is now supported in OIC.

Connections for SFDC and Netsuite have also been created, I just need to configure them.

Existing connections to SFDC and Netsuite would have been used, if they had been available within the project.

AI generated project documentation - Nobody likes writing exhaustive documentation, so let OIC generate (re-generate) project documentation for you.

The same feature is available at Integration level - 

Ask Oracle Support is available in the design canvas - 

Here I get "best practices" recommendations. Ensuring such are implemented early, can save lots of grief later.

Runtime

AI will generate more user friendly errors for your integrations.

From this - 

to this - 

Summa Summarum

Back to the initial question - Are you on projects? If not, why not? My next post will cover how to move your existing artifacts from the "global space" to projects. With each release of OIC we are adding features to make this move even easier; so watch this space!

Regarding the AI Assistant support in OIC, this is being augmented with every release of OIC.

Truly, exciting times!

Cerevisia Aestiva

Today's beer is a dark beer (dunkles) from the Brauerei Friedmann. Based in Graefenberg, close to Nuernberg, this brewery was founded in 1875 and is producing great beer with only 5 employees.

Friedmann produces a wide selection of beers, however, I love the malt and smoothness of their dunkles Sigi's Lager - Sláinte is táinte.